Thermals

by Evan Currie

  “Sending in a team without the approval of the Australian government will turn it into an incident pretty fast, Sir.” She reminded him.

  “I’ll have clearance from them before your team crosses over into Aussie territory.” He told her.

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Then tell them to be very, very, quiet.”

  *****

  “We may have a problem.”

  Abdallah Amir sighed, wincing almost invisibly as the dark words were uttered, and he pushed himself away from his desk and stood up. “Very well, Jacob. Lay it out.”

  “We found a glitch in the security system.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s not much,” Jacob stated, breathing out in frustration, “But there are digital artifacts in the image…Our system is very high definition, and we usually don’t get those artifacts.”

  “And what, pray tell, does that mean?”

  “It may mean that someone used an infiltration program to edit themselves out of the image.” Jacob explained, “That software uses image interpolation to cover up the person as they move across the camera. That kind of software alteration tends to leave behind traces in the image that we call artifacts.”

  “And there are some of these…artifacts on the security footage?”

  “Yes, Amir. We actually record two separate instances of these artifacts entering the lab…” Jacob paused, “And one leaving.”

  Abdallah muttered a curse, smashing his hands across his desk, and sent papers cascading to the ground.

  “Damn it!” He cursed again, fists clenching. “We have no more time, Jacob. The Americans, or someone, will be coming.”

  “There aren’t enough people in the greenhouse to accomplish the effect we wish,” Jacob warned.

  “I know that…” Abdallh shook his head, then stopped suddenly. “How many are there at any given time?”

  “During the day? Two…perhaps three thousand workers, another three thousand visitors during peak times.” Jacob replied.

  “Alright…Put out an announcement…” Abdallah said slowly, “Free food, free drinks…free anything you can think of. Get our… volunteers inside. I don’t care how.”

  *****

  At the police station, Gwen flipped on the lights to her office, glancing out over the dark streets of the city, and sighed as she sat down behind her desk.

  “What now?” She asked finally.

  Anselm shrugged, “We’ll have to wait I guess. She’ll contact us again.”

  “That thing still working?” Gwen nodded to the portable as Anselm shook his head and slid it onto the table.

  “No, it must be locked to its owner,” He said, “Mine is…though this seems more sophisticated.”

  Gwen shook her head, “Whatever. What do we do in the meantime?”

  “Start by checking the results of my database search,” Anselm told her, withdrawing his own portable from his pocket.

  He keyed open a connection to the International Police Network, logging into the database, and requested the search results from his earlier request. The IPN was an effort by the police communities from several nations, including the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and several other ‘First World’ countries to provide easy access to advanced investigative tools to all police organizations throughout the world.

  It gave easy access to Fingerprint, DNA, Facial Topography, and many other Law Enforcement tools to police forces in countries too poor to fund their own advanced labs, and to those communities within their own countries too small to do so.

  It also gave roving investigators like Anselm, as well as FBI and other similar groups, the tools they needed to accomplish their jobs no matter where the investigation took them.

  The networked system could do the work that normally required computing arrays and deliver it to small, affordable computer systems like Anselm’s own portable within a reasonable time frame.

  Such as the thirty minutes it had taken to do a complete facial topography scan of the nearly two hundred people who worked directly for the power generation facilities of the massive tower complex. The computers relayed their data faithfully, not aware of what good, or evil, they could sometimes be reporting.

  Anselm whistled low, looking at the data, and muttered a soft oath.

  “What is it?” Gwen asked sharply, leaning forward at her desk.

  “Trouble.” He replied, shaking his head. “Big trouble.”

  Gwen’s eyes narrowed, her face growing taught, “What kind? Is it someone on the List?”

  The ‘List’ was the international most wanted, a gathering of some of the worst criminals the world knew at any given time. Being placed on the list generally required a body count in the triple digits, given that competition for even the top one hundred was regrettably fierce.

  “That’s not it,” Anselm said, however, shaking his head. “Thankfully. Abdallah is bad enough. No, what I’m looking at is over thirty wanted terrorists here. All of them working at the Tower.”

  Gwen fell back, shaking her chair with the force her back hit it, and just stared at him.

  “Thirty?”

  Thirty. It was staggering to the officer, and she tried to place it in perspective. In any real city, her mind actually used the word ‘real’, thirty perpetrators would be a lot, but not unworkable. Here, in Tower City, that was almost as many police officers they had, including the part time deputies!

  “I’m afraid so.” Anselm said grimly, shaking his head. He was already punching in new commands, sending out the information along with an abbreviated report. “I’m calling for backup from Sydney.”

  She nodded.

  There wasn’t really a choice any more. Thirty perpetrators was, perhaps, within their ability to capture, but it would actually begin to strain the holding cells they had available.

  Even so, she could just let them go. Not now that she knew they were there.

  “Alright. How long will it take for them to get here?”

  “They’ll prep the teams, cut through the red tape… probably a day and a half, maybe two days.” He answered uncertainly. “Maybe a bit longer, it just depends on if your government has a team ready to go, or if they haven’t taken my investigation seriously.”

  “A day and a half!?” Gwen blurted, unbelieving.

  It seemed like a kick in the teeth, insult added to the injury of them being in her town in the first place.

  “We can start rounding them up ourselves,” She stated after a moment. “I can call my Captain, he’ll call in the Deputies…We split into teams, we can get most of them before they know what’s going on.”

  “Patience.” Anselm put up a hand, shaking his head.

  “Patience hell! They’re playing with bio-terrorism in MY city!” The fiery woman fumed.

  “And the last thing we want to do is push them into anything…impulsive.” Anselm responded. “Gwen, when we move, I want them all. No one escapes. No one.”

  She settled down slightly, taking a shuddering breath. She knew that he was talking about Abdallah Amir more than any of the other names, and had to concede the point. To date they knew nothing about where he was, and if they moved now, there was an excellent chance that he would escape the city.

  She wasn’t entirely willing to give up, however.

  “What if they release that god forsaken stuff before you’re ready to move?”

  Anselm nodded grimly, “That’s the one rub. It’s why I want to deal with the CIA, if they’ll exchange information with us. I need to know what it is, exactly, and try to figure out what Abdallah is trying to do with it.”

  Gwen grimaced, nodding finally. “Alright…Alright. I’m going to wake the Captain though, Anselm. Tell him to start calling in the boys. We may need them. Badly.”

  “Ok,” He agreed, “Do that…Don’t mention the CIA yet though.”

  “Why?”

  Anselm grinned, “Other than the fact that they would most likely prefer to have their na
me kept out of it? At least officially? Because he’ll probably get in a huff, and I don’t feel like trying to keep two children from fighting.”

  Gwen couldn’t help but laugh slightly at the image, quickly regaining her composure though as she glared mildly at Anselm. He just looked innocent until she laughed again and nodded, “Alright…fine. I’ll…”

  She was cut off by the portable on the desk vibrating and they looked at the piece of electronics together.

  “You deal with that,” She said, relinquishing her chair. “You can access the main servers through my terminal. I’ll go call the Captain.”

  Anselm nodded, rising himself and moving around the desk to sit at the computer terminal before he answered the portable.

  “Gunnar,” He said, flipping it open.

  “This is Cyr.” The woman on the other side said instantly, using her name for the first time. “Are you at the Tower City PD?”

  Anselm smirked slightly, “If you’re seriously asking that question, you’re not who I thought you were.”

  She tilted her head slightly, but didn’t admit anything else. “Fine. We’re sending you the simulations we have on the biological vector Agent Corvine discovered. Log into the Police Network and access the DNA profiling program, we’ll use that.”

  Anselm did as he was told and in a moment there was an animation floating in front of him, along with a series of numbers. He leaned forward frowning, reading the numbers off silently.

  “Am I reading this right?,” He wondered aloud. “This doesn’t look like any vector I’ve seen.”

  “That’s because it’s been heavily altered,” Natalie told him, “What you’re looking at is a modification of the Nineteen Eighteen Spanish Flu.”

  Anselm whistled, remembering the information on that as an academic abstract. The Spanish flu had been Pandemic, crossing the globe in its time before it had burned itself completely out.

  “I thought that was gone,” Anselm responded grimly.

  “Some strains of it still exist, primarily in research laboratories,” She told him, sighing, “We don’t know where Gorra got this one. The CDC keeps close tabs on all known strains of it, and they’ve been accounted for.”

  “Maybe he got it where they did?”

  “That’s possible,” She nodded, “Some strains were recovered from the bodies of those who had been killed by it, particularly in northern regions. It wouldn’t be impossible for Gorra to have dug up a few graves, if he knew what he was searching for.”

  Anselm nodded grimly in return, “Alright. What alterations have they made?”

  “Primarily they’ve apparently made it tougher,” She replied, “My best people are looking closer right now, but the overall effect is to make the strain much more resilient to temperature extremes. It’ll also make it much more difficult to develop a vaccine for, I’m told.”

  Anselm shook his head, “Why here? I don’t get it.”

  “That,” Natalie Cyr said grimly, “Is the frightening part.”

  Anselm raised his eyebrows, “Excuse me?”

  The fact that she didn’t think that the biological vector itself was the frightening part was somewhat, disconcerting.

  “Go to the Interpol network and access your private folders.”

  He did as he was told, quickly browsing across to his own private section of the Web, and tabbed into the folders she directed him to. Waiting for him was a program he didn’t recognize, right where she told him to look. He ran the program, watching the animation unfold on the screen in front of him.

  “The disease is intended to be cultured in the greenhouse,” Natalie told him as he watched an onscreen presentation of what she was saying, “basically building up to high concentrations by living in the host bodies of the people working and living there. Its early form is contained in irradiated carbon nanotubes, the radiation slows the progress of the disease so that it takes well over a week or more to kill it’s victim.”

  Anselm grimaced, noting that the radiation from the nano-tubes was more than enough to kill the victims on its own. It would just take a long time to do so.

  “During the initial infection period, while the victim is dying from both the disease and the radiation holding it in check, they’re constantly producing the virus. Breathing it out into the air around them,” Natalie’s voice was growing even grimmer, “Air that is being constantly pumped straight up the tower and out into the upper atmosphere, Agent Gunnar.”

  Anselm cursed, turning away for a moment as he shook. He’d guessed at that himself, in an offhanded way, but had never really stopped to really work through the ramifications. The vector, being distributed halfway across the planet by the Jetstream, would infect dozens of nations. It would pass across borders with impunity, killing without any controls.

  “We calculate that, if Gorra’s numbers are correct, the United States will see its first cases coming across the border from Mexico, and riding in on southerly winds and tropical storms, within one month of the initial dispersion.” Natalie told him, “Worst case scenarios place the total deaths in the range of a half million people. South of the Mexican border the numbers are, obviously, much worse.”

  “He’s not launching a terrorist attack,” Anselm whispered in shock, “He’s trying to launch a global pandemic.”

  Natalie Cyr nodded grimly, “That’s correct.”

  *****

  Captain Ryan Emmerson, Chief of the Tower City PD, groaned as he rolled over to the sound of his phone console chiming.

  “Damn it, Ryan,” His wife moaned, not opening her eyes, “It’s the middle of the night…”

  “Go back to sleep, Hon,” He told her, his joints creaking as he reached forward and keyed open the connection. “What is it?”

  “Ryan, we have a problem.”

  “Gwen?” Emmerson blinked, wiping his eyes clear. “What’s going on? We have another renegade flyer?”

  “No, this is worse.” Gwendolen told him grimly, “This is about Agent Gunnar.”

  Ryan shivered and forced himself awake, “Hang on a moment. I’ll move to my den.”

  He slipped the console on hold and grabbed a shirt from the foot of his bed, throwing it on as he moved over to the next room. His wife was already back asleep when he closed the door between them. Ryan sat down at his desk, flipping on the console there, and nodded to Gwen when her face showed up on the screen. “Alright, what’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I’m at the station,” She assured him, waving her hand in a dismissive manner. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about us, all of us.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Gwen looked grim, something that Ryan had never seen in her before.

  “It’s the terrorist, Abdallah Amir. You remember what I said about him?”

  Ryan nodded slowly, his face tightening. “I remember.”

  “He’s got a plan, Ryan. And it’s a bad one.” Gwendolen told him, “He’s got a biological weapon.”

  “What??” Ryan looked alarmed, “Are you sure??”

  “I’m sure. We’re sure,” She said, “Look, we have a list of other people, other terrorists, here in Tower City. Almost thirty of them. We’ve got to call up the deputies, Ryan, and get everyone on alert.”

  “Thirty!? We don’t even have the holding space for thirty people!”

  “I know, but what can we do about it?” Gwen shrugged helplessly.

  Ryan swallowed, nodding. “Alright…Look, hold tight. I’ll start rallying the troops.”

  Gwen nodded, “Thanks, Ryan.”

  “Just hang on, Gwen. We’ll get through this.”

  *****

  Natalie Cyr saw the stricken look on the Interpol Agent’s face, understanding exactly what was flowing through the man’s thoughts because the same thing had just gone through her own a few tens of minutes earlier.

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” She told him a moment later, sighing.

  “That will be a bloody good trick,” He told her, “W
hy don’t you tell me how it’s not as bad as all that?”

  “Well, the very thing that makes the Tower so dangerous as a biological deployment facility, also gives us time,” She told him grimly, “He needs to take, and hold, the tower for several days to achieve maximum effect. A week would be optimum, for his purposes, but basically the longer he can hold the tower, the better.”

  Anselm nodded grimly, “Alright…So, since nobody’s sick around here…we probably have time.”

  “Exactly.” She told him grimly, “I’m scrambling a team as we speak, several operatives and we’re looking into adding Navy Seals or Masters at Arms to the contingent even now. What I need from you is those names you told me you scanned…I need to know what they’re going to face when they arrive.”

  Anselm looked down for a moment, “How long until they get here?”

  “Two, maybe three days. We’re looking to cut that down, though.”

  He nodded, his face dark. “There is an Interpol START Unit on their way already, We’ll coordinate with your group.”

  Natalie nodded in response, “very well. The names?”

  Anselm sighed, “I got back the results of my database search…out of the two hundred people working within the power facility, there were twenty eight names on our terrorist watch list. I’ll send them now.”

  Natalie winced. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, she supposed, and chances were that an Interpol Special Tactical Response Team could handle those numbers. They certainly could with the help of the team she was dispatching.

  However, if there were nearly thirty people on the power team alone, then what about…?

  Anselm Gunnar must have seen the tightening in her face, as his next words put voice to her worst fears.

  “What I’m worried about,” He said, “is whether they’ve infiltrated into other positions as well.”

  Natalie Cyr nodded grimly, “Can you find out?”

  He smiled ironically, “Yeah. The Director won’t be pleased about the computer time it’s going to take though.”

  “I’ll bet,” Natalie said dryly, mind whirring.

  The CPU cycles needed to identify one person against the massive police database of known criminals and terrorists wasn’t an insignificant chunk of time, as far as those things went. The cycles required to search and identify almost eighty thousand people? That would grind every other computer request in an organization to a halt, and even then it might not be enough.